Are you somebody who’s ever been to a party or even knows what they are? I’ve seen my own relationship with partying evolve and take on several shades— from partying with a violent disregard for social norms and rules in my early-mid twenties, to never being invited to any parties where the cool kids were hanging as a teenager in Dubai to settling down for ‘art & drinking parties’ Sunday evenings when I’m a few months shy of 30s; I love a good party.
A party occupies the space between what we want and what we think we should want. Someone may not know what a dinner party is, but thinks she should want to host them. When I was sixteen, I was excruciatingly shy and was thrown a surprise birthday party by my two best friends, one I tolerated while being genuinely moved by their gesture. There’s something about being the center of attention at a party that was exhausting then and with age, as I built a sense of self-belief that was ultimately quite fragile, I maneuvered to always being the center of attention, much to the embarrassment of the party hosts.
In Succession, Kendall Roy throws his 40th birthday that sends him over the edge and he can’t even fool himself about what a bad time it is. Often, parties reveal there’s people you don’t like and who don’t like you and are just attending for the copious free booze and to forget who they are for one night. Sometimes, parties are simply a reason to pretend to have a good time, similar to how we act that we know how to be a person in this world. Everyone wants to be the one who knows how to have fun.
Parties seem to be about movement and action, but are actually about standing still. There is a sort of a hollowness at the center of a party; sometimes the party nearly defeats the hollowness, and sometimes it embraces it until nothing else has any space in the room. A party is a place where nothing happens and simultaneously, everything can happen.
I have spent so much of my life dressing up, and getting ready to go stand in a room, and standing in a room, and eventually going home, confused that nothing happened. Nothing is supposed to happen at a party, of course. Although sometimes, when I was young, reckless and way more fun, I had a way of making things happen.
Sometimes, I’ve been super obnoxious, gotten very high and crashed somebody’s birthday party, simultaneously changing the music without the host’s permission (a move as bold as it’s rude), while my friends attempted to drag me out. I’ve also been the sensible one, rallying people to get my friend, high on molly, to leave as she’s the last one gyrating in front of the speakers.
Over the last twelve years or so, I’ve also seen some spectacular drama go down at parties. I’ve seen people hooking up with people they definitely shouldn’t be hooking up. I’ve seen girls high on something delicious screaming at DJs to turn up the music in a club where the sound is deafening. I’ve sat in a circle of Russians and drank shroom tea. I’ve also met some interesting people— a South African photographer who I traveled to the hills with and then subsequently, shot a documentary in Delhi with. We drifted apart at his frankly, colonial insistence that Durban had better butter chicken. I’ve had a French biker flash me at a party. I’ve developed crushes on people I’ve then proceeded to stare at during several other parties. I’ve hung out at strange, foreign parties where nobody speaks English and gotten blind drunk in a corner. I’ve thrown up, passed out in a washroom, woken up and rejoined a party. I’ve helped drunk people reach home safely and invited myself to dubious after-parties. I’ve disappeared into the pulsating clubs of Berlin, losing my friends to the various dance-floors and emerged thirty six hours later, to hydrate and eat pizza that I couldn’t possibly taste.
I turn thirty in around two months. My last two birthdays were in the pandemic. I didn’t have massive parties to commemorate this frankly, existential pursuit that is being alive and making it another year. Things have changed at a startling speed. For a long time, there’s been no point talking about parties. The world, or my world anyway, moved away from parties, and back to things happening.
A couple weeks ago, I was ready to throw myself back into it, all the shit I claim to hate, and actually love, and also at the same time actually hate. I’ve missed the lavishness of people all getting together in a small space for no purpose at all. I was ready for the shared delusions; I wanted to pretend that there was something to celebrate, that we had gotten through something. I wanted the roar and hum of people crowded together in rooms, struggling to hear one another. I wanted to drink wine and sit in weird ways in chairs, and try to remember how to talk to old friends and acquaintances again. Several Decembers passed and rushed down the calendar and I couldn’t wait for party season to come back again, spelled up in lights over the intersection.
Time and consequences telescoped in on one another. I canceled the rest of the month’s parties, in a little cascade of resignation over the course of a day or so. At the last one, two of us sat in an Airbnb, doing rapid tests while ordering dinner. This was too much reality for a party. The rooms of the world close their doors so quickly; the size and shape of things changes so often and so fast, so much without warning. Life shifts from event to memory before we notice that the process has begun.
Like everyone else, I am older than I was when all this started; the crowded rooms available to me are different ones now. Last week, I thought about the parties that someone I haven’t seen in years used to throw, the way soft, bright rooms used to light up when I was younger, when I was sure that every next doorway I entered was where my whole life would finally change. Almost immediately, being canceled, parties changed in memory. The rooms got larger, warmer, quieter, more welcoming. The noise got less desperate. When I haven’t been able to go parties in a while, I forget how many of them, even small and unspectacular ones, are really the time when somebody gets up and does a sexy little dance number and nobody knows how to react; somebody has done the wrong drugs in the wrong order, and yells at the people in the compliment tunnel. I rewrite the parties in my mind, inventing them further from reality, until I can no longer sustain the delusion.
Television loves to show a party being interrupted by a horrific historical or personal event, as if that’s what we earn by having parties. If parties are fundamentally spaces where nothing happens, then they are ripe for that floor-collapsing feeling, in which bad news out of nowhere craters a hole in our lives. An event is almost always bad news. Generally— as I have recently been reminded— when things happen, it’s not a good thing. Nobody likes it when things happen; things that happen, if you round up, are universally not great. Plagues and cyclones and family estrangements are things that happen; the party goes badly because something happens at the party.
We can only deceive ourselves for so long. Eventually something happens, and when something happens, it turns on all the overhead lights in the dark bar. Parties try to be sites of escape, and for that very reason they often end up as scenes of absolute reality. Sitcoms love parties—the ones about groups of young people in big cities are often strung together by party episodes—because sitcoms are farce, and farce relies on characters telling outrageous lies and then having to try to support those lies through a series of impossible circumstances. Comedy and tragedy are much the same at their extremes, and parties are where they collide.
Parties make the promise that everything will eventually be okay. Sometimes, the season of parties shuts down with a whimper; December is just December, gray and tired. I go inside; I change my patterns. I whittle the numbers down. A party is ten people, and then it’s four, and then it’s just two, myself and the person with whom I share the space where I live, sitting together in a room that smells like fresh flowers and burnt garbage. Even this is a party; we gather in a room, we dim the lights and listen to music, and we hope that nothing will happen. We brace for the events, and we frantically try to tell ourselves that they won’t occur, that inside this warm room, our inventions can hold. Sometimes believing in one another’s delusions is a form of love; sometimes that’s a party.
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